Witness History
Episodes
Britain's forgotten slave owners: Part two
16 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How one man used research by historians at University College London into Britain's forgotten slave-owners to track down the descendants of the family...
Britain's forgotten slave owners: Part one
15 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It wasn't until recently that researchers working in the national archive in London discovered the extent to which ordinary people in Britain had been...
How US 'smart bombs' hit an Iraqi air raid shelter in the first Gulf War
12 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
More than 400 civilians were killed when two US precision bombs hit the Amiriya air raid shelter in western Baghdad on the morning of 13 February 1991...
A Ghanaian nurse's story
11 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Nurses from outside the UK form a vital part of the country's National Health Service. Many come from African countries. Cecilia Anim - who left Ghan...
The paper that helped the homeless
10 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1989 celebrities in New York set up the 'Street News' paper to help the homeless. People living rough sold the paper at a profit instead of begging...
Gay and lesbian support for the British miners' strike
09 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1984 a group of lesbians and gay men organised a benefit concert to support striking coal-miners. They sent the money they raised to a mining villa...
Francis Bacon in the archives
09 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Francis Bacon painted distorted and disturbing images but his works are now widely considered one of the great achievements of post-war British art. V...
DES Daughters
08 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
DES or Diethylstilbestrol was a form of synthetic estrogen developed in the 1930s, regularly prescribed to pregnant women to prevent miscarriage. But ...
General Robert E Lee: US Civil War rebel
05 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The US Civil War of 1861-65 left 700,000 troops dead. The Southern Confederate states rebelled against the Union of the North because the Confederates...
Drugs in the Vietnam War
04 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
During the Vietnam war, US commanders grew increasingly concerned about the widespread use of drugs by US troops in Vietnam. Initially the focus was o...
The Burma uprising of 1988
03 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On August 8th 1988 the Burmese military cracked down on anti-government demonstrators, killing hundreds possibly thousands of people. In the weeks of ...
The Moscow State Circus
02 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The biggest circus in Soviet Russia opened in Moscow in April 1971. Circus was considered the “people’s art form” in the USSR and was highly pop...
The first Eurostar from England to France
01 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The first Eurostar train left London's Waterloo station heading for the Gare du Nord in Paris in November 1994. It was the first commercial passenger ...
The anthem of the Arab Spring
29 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In December 2010, anti-government protests broke out in Tunisia after a young fruit-seller called Mohammed Bouazizi set himself alight outside a gover...
Libya's Arab uprising
28 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the early months of 2011 demonstrators took to the streets across the Arab world in what became known as the Arab spring. In February, protests in ...
Yemen's 2011 uprising
27 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt young Yemenis took to the streets in January 2011. Ishraq al-Maqtari was a lawyer and women's rights activist ...
Syria in the Arab Spring
26 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Protests erupted across the Arab world in 2011, people wanted change, an end to tyranny and dictatorship. But in Syria the unrest, and its put down by...
Egypt's Facebook Girl
25 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A wave of popular anti-government uprisings swept through the Arab world in the early months of 2011. Many of the activists who took to the streets we...
Fighting for justice for India's Sikhs
22 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Anti-Sikh violence erupted in India after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Looting, raping and killin...
Kenya's pioneering publisher
21 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When Dr Henry Chakava became Kenya's first African book editor in 1972, there were virtually no books or educational material published in African lan...
The Turner Diaries - America's manual of hatred
20 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Following the assault on the US Capitol earlier this month, Amazon banned The Turner Diaries, a racist novel blamed for inciting American neo-Nazis to...
Hitler's beer hall putsch
19 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Adolf Hitler made his first attempt to overthrow democracy in Germany in Munich in 1923. It started at a beer hall called the Bürgerbräu in Munich, ...
Landing on Titan
14 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The story of the remarkable mission to land on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. The large mysterious moon has a thick orange atmosphere. No-one had ...
Cornelia Sorabji: India's first woman lawyer
13 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Cornelia Sorabji was the first woman lawyer working in India. She helped women living in purdah or seclusion in the 19th century who had no access to ...
Puerto Rican attack at the US Capitol
12 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In March 1954, a group of Puerto Rican militants opened fire from the public gallery of the US Congress in an effort to promote their fight for indepe...
When Spain's parliament was stormed
11 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In February 1981 armed Civil Guards tried to take control of the Spanish parliament. For 18 hours they held 350 politicians hostage in the debating ch...
The book that warned 2020 would bring disaster
08 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Limits to Growth was published in 1972 and warned of global decline from 2020. Claire Bowes spoke to one of the authors of the book, Professor Den...
Sequencing the Ebola virus genome
07 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When the deadly Ebola virus broke out in West Africa in 2014, scientists in the USA set to work analysing it. What they discovered would eventually le...
The 'strike' in space
06 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The three astronauts on the Skylab 4 space research mission in 1973 got behind schedule when one of them vomited before they'd even got onto the space...
Buddhists and death row
05 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1990s a practising Buddhist called Anna Cox began visiting a murderer called Frankie Parker in jail. After his execution by lethal injection sh...
The oldest song in the world
04 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A 3,500 year old song was found on a clay tablet by archaeologists in Syria in the 1950s. Often called the Hurrian Hymn, it had been unearthed amid th...
Saving the Great Barrier Reef
31 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1960s conservationists began a campaign to prevent the Queensland government from allowing mining and oil drilling on Australia's Great Barrier...
Le Corbusier and Chandigarh
30 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Shortly after Indian independence Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru persuaded the maverick Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier, to help reinvent a newl...
The building of the Aswan Dam
29 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In July 1970, one of the largest dams in the world - the Aswan High Dam in Egypt - was completed. It had taken ten years to build, and was not without...
UNESCO and race and tolerance
28 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
UNESCO – the educational, scientific and cultural arm of the United Nations was first established in 1945. Its aim was to use education as a means o...
It's a Wonderful Life
25 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In December 1946, the classic Christmas film "It's a Wonderful Life" had its premiere in Hollywood. Starring Jimmy Stewart, the movie's message of hop...
Studio Ghibli - Japan's Oscar-winning animators
24 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1986 the first Studio Ghibli film hit the cinema screens. It would go on to bring Japanese animation to a world audience. Hirokatsu Kihara w...
Satyajit Ray - India's master of film
23 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Bengali film director Satyajit Ray has been described as one of the most influential directors in world cinema, with acclaimed US director Martin Scor...
The Sound of Music
22 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The heart-warming musical, The Sound of Music, was released in 1965 and went on to become one of the most successful films of all time. It was based o...
The Great Dictator
21 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In late 1940, The Great Dictator was first released in the USA. In his first role in talking movies, Charlie Chaplin satirised Adolf Hitler and his Na...
The GDR's Namibian children
18 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On December 18th 1979 hundreds of Namibian children were taken to East Germany to escape the war in their home country. But after communism in Europe ...
The blockade of Gibraltar
17 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In December 1982, Spain reopened its border with Gibraltar after a 13-year blockade of the disputed British territory. The border was closed by the di...
British reality TV is born
16 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The first British fly-on-the-wall documentary series aired on the BBC in 1974. It was called The Family and followed the lives of the Wilkins family i...
The birth of Bangladesh
15 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In December 1970 Pakistan held its first democratic elections since gaining independence from British colonial rule in 1947. The elections led to war...
White Christmas
14 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
American entertainer Bing Crosby made 'White Christmas' by Irving Berlin, one of the defining songs of World War Two. Rebecca Kesby has been speaking ...
The return of the beaver
11 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2009, beavers were released into the wild in the Knapdale forest on the west coast of Scotland, some 400 years after they were wiped out in the UK...
Neanderthal cave mystery
10 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A teenage potholer discovered a cave system near the town of Bruniquel in France in 1990 which contained a mysterious circular structure. It turned ou...
Chief Albert Luthuli wins the Nobel Prize for Peace
09 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When Chief Albert Luthuli won the Nobel Peace Prize he was living under a banning order in rural South Africa. He won the prize for advocating peacefu...
The pioneer of 'Mountain Filming'
08 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1920 a German filmmaker called Arnold Fanck shot his first film - 'Marvels of the Snowshoe' - high in the mountains. He and his team dragged camera...
The life and work of Chester Himes
07 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The African-American crime writer Chester Himes first found widespread success in France. Although his early works had been published in the USA it wa...
The V1 flying bomb
04 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1944, Nazi Germany launched the V1s against the UK. The V1 was a pilotless, jet-propelled flying bomb - the first of its kind in the world and a pr...
The slaves who defeated Napoleon
02 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The first successful slave uprising in modern times happened in present-day Haiti. Former slave, Toussaint Louverture, forced the French colony to abo...
France's Muslim headscarf ban
02 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A controversial law banning Islamic headscarves and other religious symbols from French state schools came into effect in 2004. The ban was designed t...
Iraq's pioneering feminist
01 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Naziha Al-Dulaimi became the first woman to hold a ministerial office in the Arab world when she was appointed to head Iraq's Municipalities Minist...
How Ethiopian rebels took power in 1991
30 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In May 1991, the brutal Ethiopian dictator, Colonel Mengistu and his miltary regime were on the verge of collapse after years of civil war. The end ca...
The fight for disabled rights in the UK
27 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The UK government passed the landmark Disability Discrimination Act in November 1995. The legislation made it illegal for employers or service provid...
Rwanda at the Paralympics
26 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2012, the Rwandan sitting volleyball team became the first Paralympians from their country. The sport began in Rwanda after thousands of people wer...
India's campaign for disability rights
25 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In December 1995, the first disability rights legislation was passed by India's parliament. An estimated 60 million people, almost six percent of Indi...
Britain's little blue disability car
24 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For decades disabled people in the UK were offered tiny, three-wheeled, turquoise cars as their main form of transport. They were known as Invacars an...
Helen Keller
23 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Helen Keller was born in Alabama in the USA in 1880. A childhood illness left her deaf and blind, but she still learned to speak and read and write. ...
When the Egyptian president went to Israel
20 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1977, Anwar Sadat became the first Egyptian president to visit Israel and address the Israeli parliament the Knesset. At the time, Egypt was still ...
Our Bodies, Ourselves
19 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Some have described Our Bodies, Ourselves as “obscene trash” – for others it’s a vital source of information about women’s health and sexual...
America's WW2 refugee camp
18 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1944 President Franklin D Roosevelt agreed to allow nearly one thousand Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe to come to America. The...
The world's first woman premier
17 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sirimavo Bandaranaike was elected the modern world's first female head of government in 1960 when she became Prime Minister of Sri Lanka or Ceylon as ...
Captured by Somali pirates
16 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2008, Captain Colin Darch and his crew were taking a tug boat from Russia to Singapore when they were attacked by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Ade...
The 'good enough' mother
13 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott helped shape childcare in Britain through a series of BBC radio broadcasts in the 1940s and 50s. He s...
When Pluto lost its planet status
12 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
An international committee of astronomers agreed Pluto wasn't really a planet in 2006. They reclassified it as a 'dwarf planet' instead. The decision ...
World War One in Africa
11 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
At the start of World War One, British and German colonial forces went into battle in East Africa. Tens of thousands of African troops and up to a mil...
Makaton - the signing system that changes lives
10 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1970s, British speech therapist Margaret Walker invented a revolutionary system of communication for children and adults with special needs. Ma...
The Guerrilla Girls
09 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1985, a group of anonymous female artists in New York began dressing up with gorilla masks on their heads and putting up fly-posters around the cit...
The church that rose from the rubble
06 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2005 Dresden’s Lutheran church, the Frauenkirche, opened its doors to the public for the first time in 60 years. The Frauenkirche in the East Ger...
The 1945 Pan-African Congress
05 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The 5th Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester in 1945 to shape the post-war struggle against colonialism and racial discrimination. Prominent bl...
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin
04 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On November 4th 1995 the Israeli rock star Aviv Geffen sang at a peace rally in Tel Aviv alongside Israel's leader Yitzhak Rabin. Moments later the Pr...
'I just wanted to be white'
03 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, thousands of children were born to white German women and black American soldiers who were stationed in A...
The sex musical that wowed New York and London
02 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1969, a theatrical revue called Oh Calcutta opened in New York featuring extensive male and female nudity. Created by renowned critic Kenneth Tynan...
With the president on 9/11
30 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On September 11 2001, President George W. Bush was visiting an elementary school in Florida as two planes hit the World Trade Center. In an image that...
Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority
29 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In June 1979 the Moral Majority was launched and changed the course of American politics. It was set up to promote family values by religious conserva...
The Watergate scandal
28 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1973, the US Senate began an investigation which would eventually lead to Richard Nixon standing down as President a year later. Senator Howard Bak...
Shirley Chisholm - the black woman who tried to be president
27 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In January 1972 Shirley Chisholm became the first major-party black candidate to make a bid for the US Presidency. She was also the first black woman ...
When JFK won the US presidency
26 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ted Sorensen was a close aide and speechwriter for John F Kennedy. In an interview with Lucy Williamson he remembered the night that Kennedy won the U...
Nasa's pioneering black women
23 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Usually it is the names of astronauts that people remember about the space race. But less celebrated are the teams of people working on how to put a r...
The missing victims of apartheid
22 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2005, South Africa set up the Missing Persons Task Team to trace and locate the remains of the hundreds, possibly thousands, who disappeared in "po...
The Cutter Incident
21 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In April 1955, more than 100,000 children in America were inoculated with a defective batch of the brand-new polio vaccine. Because of a manufacturing...
Joan Littlewood, 'mother of modern British theatre'
20 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The working class woman who shook up the British theatre establishment in the 1950s and 60s. Joan Littlewood introduced improvisation and helped break...
Why Portugal decriminalised all drugs
19 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the grip of a drugs crisis, the country took a radical approach in 2001 and became the first country in the world to decriminalise all drugs for pe...
Saddam Hussein's big movie project
16 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1980 the Iraqi strongman, Saddam Hussein, tried to launch his country's entry into the world of movie making. He spent millions of dollars on an ep...
The US Voting Rights Act of 1965
15 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Although African Americans were guaranteed the right to vote by the constitution, many in the south were being denied that right. During the civil rig...
The last of the Kazakh herders
14 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Many of the nomadic herders in Kazakhstan left the USSR and moved to China in the 1920s. They feared being forced into collective farms by the Soviet ...
The end of the Lebanese Civil War
13 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On October 13th 1990, the Syrian airforce pushed their most outspoken opponent in Lebanon, General Michel Aoun, to take refuge in the French embassy i...
The launch of CNN
12 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In June 1980, US media mogul Ted Turner launched the first TV station dedicated to 24 hour news, Cable News Network or CNN. Some were sceptical that ...
The Battle of Lewisham
09 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1977, the racist National Front organisation planned to stage a march into Lewisham in South London at a time of high racial tension in the ...
Desmond's - a sitcom that changed Britain
08 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Desmond's was the most successful black sitcom in British TV history. It ran on Channel 4 for over five years, attracting millions of viewers. Trix Wo...
Fighting racism on the dancefloor
07 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
New laws were used to stop nightclubs and discos from banning black and ethnic minority customers in 1978. The first club to be taken to court was a d...
Britain's first black woman headteacher
06 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Yvonne Conolly was made headteacher of Ringcross Primary school in North London in 1969. She had moved to the UK from Jamaica just a few years earlier...
The voyage of the Empire Windrush
05 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Hundreds of pioneering migrants travelled from the Caribbean to the UK on board the SS Empire Windrush in 1948. The passage cost £28,10 shillings. Pa...
The house by the lake
02 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A summer house built by a lake outside Berlin in the 1920s reflects much of Germany's 20th century history. Its first owners fled the Nazis. The Berli...
Operation Breakthrough: Fighting to save three whales
01 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Three Californian gray whales got caught in ice off Alaska in October 1988. Indigenous people, environmentalists, oil companies and even the Soviet Na...
The founding of Google
30 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The world's most popular search engine was launched in September 1998 by two PHD students from Stanford University in California. Larry Page and Serge...
The Mafia trial of Italy’s former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti
29 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Prosecutor Gian Carlo Caselli explains how leading Italian politician Giulio Andreotti was put on trial in Sicily in September 1995, accused of collus...
The death of Gamal Abdel Nasser
28 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The charismatic Egyptian president dominated Arab politics for almost two decades up until his death on September 28th 1970. His funeral was attended ...